50 SONGS
released AUGUST 23, 2024
ALBUM 50, RELEASE 141
It's been entirely too long since I've written for this website. To return to this project, I picked an album where I knew I liked every song. Actually, that may prove untrue, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This is an album I'm still immensely proud of. It has 50 fucking songs on it! I recorded 15 of the 50 songs in 2 different songs, and parts of others in a practice space I used quite a bit for this, and then not a lot afterwards. I spent a lot of money on that practice space. A sick band called Assisted Living used it too so at least the money didn't go to waste.
Someone reviewed 50 Songs and said their favorite song was "Shadow of the Emperor". That song is my attempt at grappling with whiteness. It was the last song I wrote for the album because I wanted a great song to open the album. That someone thought it was the best song on the album bummed me out. It's why I don't like putting "the hit" first. "This Is Your Life" is one of the 11 songs recorded at the Boom Room in Fishtown. These songs were the first songs recorded for the album, and it took 2 calendar days (4 hours each day). The engineer, Gary Dann, said I was one of the most prepared musicians he'd ever recorded. Maybe he was just flattering me, but one of my roommates was in a band with him and said roommate told me the same thing. I interned at a popular recording studio in spring 2021 and none of the people I saw in there had the fire that I had in the Boom Room. No disrespect to any of them (well, yes to 2 of them) but they were content taking their time. That's fine. Ironically, one of the early tracks on this album is titled after one of the bands that recorded at that studio just after my internship ended. The song isn't about them, but the title is a jab at them for sure. "Shy" was one of 4 songs written in the span of 2 hours for a 2-hour song challenge I took part in. Everyone else spent 2 hours making 1 song. I made an EP. The other 3 songs all made the album too. I expected good things to emerge but I didn't expect the lead single to come out of it. I thiiiiink someone once told me "Shy" was their favorite HW song. Believe it or not, Shy is a real person, and while the song is not about her, the decision to make Shy a person and not an adjective is thanks to her. Maybe you've read her music reviews. She's cool. "Teach Us To Make Rock" was a response to a Lahnah song called "The Mountain of Pure Rock". It's also the first of 4 songs recorded in 5 hours at the Hidden Fortress. The studio time was cheap and I walked in with a bass, some pedals, and some lyrics. The music was all recorded drums first, and improvised from there. I should do something like that again when I have the money to throw around. "Barefoot" was originally 2 different instrumentals. I took the first half of one of them, and the second half of the other, and slapped them together. I played "Thorn Church" at a solo show a few months before this came out, and someone was so blown away by it that he asked me to play an open mic the next month. That open mic was fun but awkward for me since I ended up being way more distorted than everyone else. Oh well. The bass riff accidentally got reused and expanded upon when I joined Edweirdo and the Elephants and turned it into "Amazing Binz". I showed my cousin this album and, inexplicably, "Ugly Hearts" was his favorite. Now seems like a good time to mention that, like No Victories, I actually had all the songs flow into each other. Unlike No Victories, the effect ends up being fairly subtle here. "Time To Leave" being track 24 is a travesty. I think I felt it was too obvious putting it near the end, but in hindsight I absolutely should have done that. I also felt like I didn't give "Off" enough to be a truly great closer, so maybe if I'd swapped the two it would have worked better. That this is the only issue I have with the sequencing of a 50-song album is kind of impressive. "Pocket God" was the only one of the 11 Boom Room songs without a proper demo. The day before the first session, I'd had a bad day at work, so I went to Russo Music to engage in some ill-advised retail therapy. I tried out 5 different Earthquaker distortion/fuzz pedals, and the Acupulco Gold stood out. While messing with that one, I figured out how to play the "Pocket God" riff I'd written back in February. The new arrangement emerged in that little room they have in the back, and I bought the pedal brand new even though I knew I could get it much cheaper on Reverb. I wanted to have it for the studio sessions, and it's one of a few pedals that really makes its mark on this album. I don't use it a ton anymore but I do still have it. I know for a fact that "Only 1 Thing" is someone's favorite song from this album. I think this is a funny favorite to have. HW was certainly no stranger to anti-pop experimentation before this album, but I feel like this song is a new type of that sort of thing that became more common on HW albums after this. It leads nicely into another popular song from this album, "My Headphones Are Falling Apart". It's the only song on the album to feature acoustic guitar (a fact exactly 1 person said held the album back) and it wasn't mine. I asked my roommate (from earlier) if I could borrow his for a few minutes. I performed this a lot in 2024, but it sorta fell off in early 2025 and I haven't been in a rush to bring it back. Maybe soon. More likely to come back is "Alone and his Everywhere Else Tricks", a simple little song from the Hidden Fortress session that just stuck with me. "The Summers We Lost" and "The Tank" have proven to be eternal. Those are easy setlist adds with any lineup. "A-side denies all self-wrongdoing, B-side has been decapitated" is my Israel/Palestine comment in "Just Following Orders". Really, that whole song is about IDF soldiers. "It's Been Easier" is about how life in my house had become easier when one of the cats died. There were 3 cats, and one of them was a real bastard, but he ate something he shouldn't have and that was that. "Manifesto" came from the end of "Right to Destroy". They were recorded together but I thought they should be different songs. As stated earlier, I think "Off" is a lukewarm ending to something this big, but oddly enough, it sort of works. 50 Songs isn't an album of winners, it's an album of songs. It's patchy by design. I like it that way. I feel like a lot of musicians these days are content releasing albums with 9 songs and they're 22 minutes long and saying "look, an album" when it's really an EP, but I don't care that much. I'm glad you're putting out music at all. Nonetheless that's not how I'd ever do it, so my contribution to the music world is saying "here's a shitton of music, you decide what's good or not". My next album is half an hour longer than this.